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THE FLASHES THAT CAME TO STAND FOR US The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Sat 22 Jun 0000
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of this crossover. lAlexander Kennedy;
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TEST TRANSMISSION CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 22 Jul 0...
Art and IV are perfect little worlds that don't really need you, 1 Ike the murmur of books In a library. the bu/xing of the tube Is both comforting and all consuming. Test fiansmrssron at the CCA in Glasgow brings this tension to the fore. With a cooler than thou Warholian aesthetic underpinning the gloriously dated late /‘()s to early 80s sensation of watching telly in a gallery.
This group show brings together work by Stuart Baker. George Barber. CACTV, Davrd Hall, Nam June Park, John Godfrey. Valle Export. Wolf Vostell, Michael FrancOIs. Deep Dish Televrsron Network. Top Value Televrsion and Andy Warhol - fodder fora night-in wrth the telly for a Channel—hopping art boffin. The exhibition acts as a selective history of TV and Video as media for the artist. movrng from a very late modernist examination of the formal aspects of these formats (in the work of Hall and Park. for example) to the political uses and abuses of ‘the box’ (Telestreet. etc).
CACTV present a pseudo documentary With Lithuanian rntervrewer and intervrewee engaged in a straight-faced battle of wrts. hilarioust and intelligently deconstructrng monuments in Vilnius. The artists walk around the City misnaming and reinterpreting historical monuments — a female bust becomes Christra Agurlera. another is transformed into Brian Ferry yet another Iggy Pop. The city becomes a monument to the death of Pop Culture. wrth the VldeO acting as a black box recorder. tAlex Kennedy.
PHOTOGRAPHY HELLEN VAN MEENE Stills, Edinburgh, until Sat 15 Jul 000
Exposing inner awkwardness and naivété is never going to be particularly attractive to any sitter, least of all a teenage mum from Wandsworth. But Hellen van Meene’s latest photographic works, featuring said mothers and their juvenile peers, traverse this and the grey area between collaboration, cooperation and collusion, with startling results.
Lined up in self-consciously obsessive rows along Still’s white walls, the simply-framed headshots take great care to conceal what is actually a series of highly orchestrated poses, geometrical patterns of light, and sculpted detail. Admittedly, the young Dutch artist is candid about her engineering, and does not insist her work is portraiture or documentary. Her sophisticated approach to colour and texture is not enough to carry each image, but these fine aesthetics spark against the callowness of her subjects to produce something altogether surprising - man-boys, girl-ladies, the cherubic faces of a quickly-fading adolescence. Her subjects appear unfamiliar in isolation, alone or simply in pairs. A boy sitting with a temporary tattoo proudly
Visual Art
St Petersburgh
brandished on his arm, a young pregnant woman suspiciously eyeing the photographer; all the subjects arranged in classical compositions, but made remarkable by the strange combination of a teenage, steely-eyed guardedness and an ingenuous curiosity. Appearing at once proud and uncertain of sexuality, these young adults pose uneasily. And despite all of van Meene‘s management of the scene, it is this off-balance and spontaneous condition that makes the photographs so perceptive.
This quality should be a rare one, swiftly pinning subject to paper by a single click of the camera. But with so many works on display, all aiming to capture that same off-balanced youthfulness, it’s unfortunate that quantity ends up smothering quality. Van Meene keeps doing the same trick one photograph after another, revealing too much and steadily destroying that uncommon elusive detail she first constructed. Under such strain and the absence of her careful ruse, the works simply divulge glossy slickness. And although the photographs are indeed beautiful, it's this over- exercised finesse about the works that lends them to the language of design and increasingly away from the artfulness of the first few photographs. (lsla Leaver-Yap)
r, ', THE LIST 91